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Comment Excuse Card? (Score 1) 64

$230

My jaw drops, but then I split. Half of me remains smugly looking down on fuckwits, but the other half hears that Samuel Adams' Utopia, which costs about the same, is supposedly showing up in CostCos, and while I can't justify getting a bottle .. maybe I don't have to justify things.

No.

No, it would still be stupid to do.

Comment Don't get too happy about Chinese "overcapacity" (Score 1) 154

So now China is making too many electric cars and solar panels, compared to domestic demand. Their solution was to export that stuff. Now we want to impose tariffs on those things, so that global demand for Chinese stuff is artificially depressed. But when China loses markets for their stuff, what will they make with their comically overbuilt production capacity? Not solar panels or clean cars, but weapons. It turns out tariffs don't stop the "export" of bombs and missiles and attack drones to Taiwan.

Comment Re:Something to watch inbetween (Score 1) 58

The second movie, Aliens, also didn't have the mood of the first movie, yet was still one of the best movies ever made (IMHO! of course). I don't think the feel of the original is necessary in sequels, and might even be so hard to recreate that it's borderline hubris to try.

I'll probably watch it .. when I feel like doing nothing and thinking the presence of the xenomorph is a coincidence.

I think that is the best attitude one can take. The "domestication" of the xeno is the weakest part of this TV series, but OTOH, the inclusion of all the new monsters is part of what makes A:E so fun. The classic xeno is just one monster among many, now.

There are so many horrible ways to die. Show us more of them, Noah! ;-)

Comment Re:Customized music is the future (Score 2) 68

You'd be surprised how difficult that actually is. Take the role of a DJ for instance - a good DJ will know what genre they're doing, play well know things from that genre but also introduce new music to keep it fresh. They might also step outside the genre a little - not too far so it's not dissonant with the rest of their set, but just far enough to give a break and a moment of "ah, that's nice/romantic/gnarly/metal/" for the listener.

It's a skill, and if you haven't got that ability to start with then you're unlikely to be able to give the correct prompts to create it. You might well get a lot of identical things, but a listenable varied set is more than that.

Comment Re:*some* games (Score 1) 97

A worry might be SteamOS as a requirement, rather than as simple support. You could imagine kernel modules being developed for 'anti-cheat' and them running under SteamOS but not some other distro that may (justifiably) block them.

Comment Re:Praise Gabe! (Score 2) 97

This is the most (in fact only) interesting thing about the announcements to me. Must say I'm not sure about it - can't see how mouse+keyboard style games, which the original Stream Controller was explicitly designed to work well with, would pan out.

I have hugely customised layouts for several games to the point where I can't imagine playing them without it - they tend to be RPG games like Skyrim and Elder Scrolls Online. It's that style of game I'm trying to imagine mapping to the new layout, and to be honest gen1 looks more amenable to me at first glance. Hope to be proven wrong though.

Comment Can it run Mac OS yet? (Score 0) 58

Nobody wants your shitty iOS. People tolerate it on phones, because you taught them that it's ok for PCs to suck if they fit in one hand. But once the one hand constraint is lifted, people come back to their senses for some weird reason. You did too good a job of persuading people to treat phones as weird exceptions to common sense, when you should have undermined common sense itself (but that would have harmed Mac sales).

Comment Re: It's in the effort. (Score 4, Insightful) 88

Hahaha, what?

You say the pilot in control should have intentionally sheered off the wings (FULL OF JET FUEL) off during a dual-engine failure? You obviously have no idea about planes.

There is nothing that could have been done. They were past V1. There was no arrester pit at the end of the runway (which wouldn't have done much). We're talking about a vehicle loaded with 10,000s of lbs of fuel. Sheering the wings off would have spread chaos and destruction.

There is nothing that could have been done.

Comment Re:!free, good riddance (Score 2, Informative) 93

Sorry but from an outside perspective that just sounds nuts. So let's take your 'worst case' - $129M overall cost making it $434 per entry - you're saying there are only 297,235 (129M / 434) tax payers in the US? A quick search from me shows the number of filings to be at 145M+. If everyone could file for free, that $129M would be 88c per person.

And I'm speaking from experience. I'm in the UK. I've recently filed my annual self-assessment tax. I used the free service on the UK government web site and the thing that took the longest was working out how much to put as charity donation. Whole thing done in less than an hour and a half.

I seriously cannot comprehend the approach where you have to pay to be able to pay someone. It's...well...it's nuts.

Comment Bring back the WoT! (Score 2) 11

Spam, spam, spam, eggs and spam didn't provide enough incentive to try to distinguish between humans and skin jobs, but now "AI slop" does? Ok, great!

Check the OpenPGP signature.

Unsigned? /dev/null.

Signed but no trust path? /dev/null

Signed and with a trust path? Can still be trash, but its claims to be of human origin, are worth taking seriously. If you find a problem (e.g. someone trusted the wrong person) then deal with that then.

Comment Re: Will make things less secure (Score 1) 84

Ok, except: that doesn't address vulnerabilities in C/C++ apps which are stopped in Rust. This also ignores the fact that there already exist functional tests of these core utilities.

If I can swap a 2mm hex nut from company A for a 2mm hex nut from company B -- and the nuts pass acceptance tests -- that's what you want. It's *ELIMINATING* sources of error within the existing framework of tests.

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